ABSTRACT
Charles Taylor has noted our willingness to see our pre-modern ancestors as less egoistic than ourselves. They did not seem to share our individualism, our preoccupation with personal fulfillment, were less obsessed with material acquisition, and unselfconsciously explained their life’s purpose through a broad social or religious vision. But this interpretation, argues Taylor, is superficial, and stems from a conceptual scheme that is appropriate to modern man alone:
The passage leaves it unclear whether we differ from our forebears only in our conception of human satisfaction or whether the nature of our satisfaction itself has actually changed. This largely revolves around how we understand the notion of identity and the relation between our ideas about ourselves and who we actually are. I am inclined to think Taylor intends the stronger thesis. After all, few persons, today or in the past, entertain ideas about the structure of human satisfaction as such. And it seems that the scope of Taylor’s observations is meant to encompass more than intellectual history. Without as yet endorsing what I take to be Taylor’s claim, I want to explore how egoism would have to be construed differently under the modern and pre-modern dispensations.
